


Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

by TheLightdancer



Category: Power Girl (Comics), Supergirl (TV 2015), Superman - All Media Types, The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Filling in canonical cracks, Power Girl deserves better
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:20:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25882741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: Karen Starr is feeling especially lonely one day. Kara Zor-El goes to talk to her and then they're joined by a stranger.
Relationships: Alex Danvers/Maggie Sawyer, Death of the Endless & Karen Starr, Desire of the Endless & Karen Starr, Karen Starr & Clark Kent, Karen Starr & Kara Zor-El
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	Empty Chairs at Empty Tables

NEW TROY, METROPOLIS:

Looking at the unconscious body of Faora Ul-Hul, one of the few Kryptonians who managed to repeatedly treat the Phantom Zone like Batman's Rogues treated Arkham, as more of a rest cure than a prison, Karen Starr froze. They'd fought and it had been another of those curious fights. Her multiverse was gone, and yet others lived. There was even a counterpart of her in this multiverse, the Supergirl of Earth-2, who had the same name but wore the House of El symbol instead of the blank spot that represented, at one level, both bait for the inclinations of various men and women alike, and at another level the simple inability to decide on a symbol that became a symbol in itself. She was more powerful than the Kryptonians of this multiverse by orders of magnitude, on par with the fortunately erased from everything save memory Superboy-Prime. They could move quintillions of tons and she could move planets like softballs and light stars with her eyes and fly across the universe at the same pace she could use to circumnavigate this world or Jupiter, for that matter.

Faora had expected to see the one she insisted on calling Kal-El but he was off-world for the time being, working with the Green Lantern Corps against the tyrant Mongul. In his absence she and her counterpart's counterpart were the ones that did the equivalent tasks of Clark. Faora had sneered at her outfit, called her a set of derogatory, misogynist insults (and then looked her over again and licked her lips which really made Karen mad). Then they'd gone for a fight and what Faora had expected to be another case of running rings around the slower Superman and Supergirl had turned into a lopsided beatdown after the first few minutes of super-speed enhanced blows and now, five minutes later, she was down and a street was cratered.

Karen sighed. It felt wrong, all of this. This Metropolis was not quite like the one from her home timeline, nor like most of the other ones she knew. It was starker, more austere, more in the sense of New York City, the Big Apricot's lesser and envious cousin. Yet it was home, or as close to it as she got.

Kara Zor-El, who had taken up defending both Metropolis and National City until Power Girl had shrugged and decided to take up Metropolis in her stead, arrived with the Phantom Zone projector and in its swoop Faora went, screaming curses at them in that neatly square and swooping energy that left her oddly less Picasso-esque than she expected, one of the more eerie elements of that technology.

In the wake of the fight, Karen flew up to the roof of the Daily Planet building where she just sat with her head in her hands. It was a long day, though the satisfaction of treating Metallo and Lex Luthor's Kryptonite-reliant weaponry like a laser pointer and giving them the business never faded. They never learned. The Kryptonite that could affect her had died with the Alexander Luthor of Earth-Three-that-was's mad schemes. She was invincible, in truth. No Kryptonite that could harm her and even the magic of this multiverse didn't work quite right on her. It backfired in various ways, almost always at the expense of the person who cast it.

To her amusement, if far less so than those who sought to do it, she was even beyond mind control, as even the most powerful forces that had tried it, including a being with burning golden eyes and a voice like honey and two shadows, had seen it fail. Of them all golden eyed two-shadows' power was the greatest, something she could barely grasp. It was as if desire itself had arisen before her to see if she could fall to its power, and it had taken a great effort but she had endured, and found to her surprise a wary nod of respect and then a genuinely friendly smile.

Ever since Two-Shadows had become something of a friend of hers, which she did not understand, and did not probe too closely. Whatever lurked behind the twin shadows and the honeyed voice was not a person or a concept she wished to probe too deeply. And at times she dreamed of mirrors and a fanged, porcine face that ripped at itself with mirrors. She looked feminine but she was not feminine, no moreso than Two-Shadows was truly male or female, as opposed to whatever was wished. Two-Shadows had most recently intervened to help them against Mr. Mxyptlk who'd expected Clark and was unamused and decided to try to show some of his menace.

Then he'd seen Two-Shadows and squeaked in fright and called Two-Shadows "Desire of the Seven" and vanished, leaving the traces of his mischief unmade with his vanishing and normality restored.

These thoughts roiled through her head as Kara Zor-El flew up, and brought with her pot-stickers. Karen took them with a slight roll of her eyes, and saw Kara talking to her sister, Alex. Alex Danvers was an amazing woman, as badass as they came, and as gay as they came, for that matter. Karen wondered sometimes about the degree to which Alex's eyes diverted to her chest when they talked but she didn't really care or mind that much. Alex talked to Kara about a few issues, things of National City and the DEO, and speculation on what J'onn and Reign might get up to. 

Reign, to Karen, was merely proof of the further differences between their worlds and not always a welcome one. _Her_ Krypton had not had such monsters, nor had it had the Doomsday-abomination that proved annoyingly resilient but less so than her. Of course hers had seemed a paradise and so beholden to it that it could not imagine it truly ending and when the Brothers El warned that Krypton's paradise held the deadly flaw of the Green Death they were dismissed, save by the Black Zero Cult. Yet in her Krypton the Black Zero people, who were somewhat like Reign, were terrorists who were banished to the Phantom Zone. Reign and company were dominators, agents sent to infiltrate, to hide on worlds that granted the radiation-soaked powers, to conquer. They were agents of Krypton itself and that gap horrified her as Kara took it for granted.

And yet, when Reign overcame her programming, she was as nice as any other and became a hero in her own right, helping to protect both National City and the broader elements of the Western Hemisphere where Supergirl could not be.

Alex and Kara finished their talk with mutual, surprisingly and annoyingly sappy and cheerful "I love yous" and she sighed inwardly, munching on the potstickers.

As Kara turned off her communicator she turned to Karen, who raised an eyebrow.

"What's wrong, Karen?"

Karen stared levelly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Don't give me that bullshit, what's wrong?" 

She raised an eyebrow. "Don't use that language around your sister or she'll make you wash that mouth out with soap."

"Stop giving me the run-around, Karen Starr, I want to know what's bothering you. You look like someone ran over your dog."

Karen laughed. "I'd love to see how the insurance agent would handle a car running into Krypto."

Kara's eyes began to show the faintest flashings of blue light (itself another look at a gap between their universes) and she raised a hand. "All right, all right. I'm just....I'm missing my own universe. And multiverse. Everyone and everything I knew is gone and there's another me, here. I'm not supposed to exist and I don't know what the point is."

Kara sighed, sadly, placing her hand on Karen's shoulder. "I get that. I do. There's nights when I think of Argo City and Krypton and dream of everything that I wish could have been the case. Living on my own world, Kal growing up as my cousin and younger cousin and not my older cousin turned mentor. My parents alive and here and not seeing my father die as my ship took off and having that be the last I saw of them."

"And that's in a place where I have a home, and a family. I get what you're experiencing but I also can't. Just....I know a small element of how odd it must be, but....you're not alone. Don't ever think that."

Karen gave her a sad smile and then hugged her tightly, Kara reacting like a normal person or even the less powerful superheroes did to an over-enthusiastic hug from the Tamaranian princess in Jump City.

After that they talked for a bit further and then Karen Starr flew off, returning to her apartment.

She turned on the lights and strode in, it was a large apartment, one that to her satisfaction had once belonged to the Lex Luthor of this world and was now hers. She'd stamped the House of El sigil everywhere the Luthorcops and Luthor family's sigil had been, and a few priceless mementos of her family were here.

The most priceless was an image of three people. The Kara Zor-El she knew, the first one, with her midriff bared and her skirt that was of a much simpler material than Kara she knew. Her cousin, Kal, with the grey hair around his temple that gave him a look seemingly in between that of Christopher Reeves, whose look was so like that of Clark that it had led to some adventures more amusing to them than to Mr. Reeves, at first. And her, on the right, smiling and happy. A photograph that had endured the Anti-Monitor and the Infinite Crisis produced by Alexander Luthor, and other things, besides.

Here she was, in an apartment that was the size of a small house, touching a picture in a frame and an aching loneliness and sadness and just.....the emotions that surged threatened her careful facade and then it broke, her vision swimming and tears flowing down her cheeks. The memory of holding Kal one last time in that horrid mirror of the other Superman and _his_ cousin, holding him just to see him die and truly being henceforth and forever alone, the last traces of her multiverse gone with him overwhelmed her and she fell to her knees and then prostrate on her floor, weeping in great wrenching sobs.

She did not see the two beings that materialized, one a golden-eyed figure wearing a suit jacket that exposed a perfectly androgynous bone-hued skin tone and a svelte body, on top of brown pants and heeled shoes. Another with eyes of infinite night and hair to match clad all in black, an umbrella held like a cane at her side. Her friend Two-Shadows spoke quietly to the woman with the infinitely dark eyes and gave Karen a sad look, and the woman in black with eyes dark as her clothes stared at her with initial suspicion, having good reason to distrust her younger sister-brother, but then hearing her crying, she couldn't not.....

Karen heard a voice, soft and gentle, speaking to her. That voice had not been in her apartment until she heard the person speaking, and her face whirled up.

_**Hello.** _

Her eyes widened. The being before her looked like a young woman but in truth was no more a woman than the porcine thing she'd seen in mirrors at times, or Two-Shadows. She knew this one well, she'd seen her before, both on her job and in that day. Her eyes narrowed.

"You."

_**Yes, me.** _

"Are you here to take me, then?"

Her question was acidic, and she felt a great choking rage at seeing this concept that took that form that part of her could not help but envy the beauty and grace thereof that had only a loose rival in Diana among the living.

**_No, I'm afraid not._ **

"What have I done that was so terrible that I had to watch everyone I loved and even those I hated die but I'm still here?"

Her question was still more hostile and the rage and anger and guilt and shame and grief that had surged through her was incandescent enough that she sought to literally grab Death's top, to force a woman who was a good fourteen inches shorter than she was to answer that question directly. Her hand did grab the straps but when she sought to pull, Death did not move, and simply looked at her with understanding and kindliness that left her feeling hollow and empty.

_**You didn't do anything one way or the other, Kara Zor-L. Survival is neither blessing nor curse, it just is.** _

The first sentence was spoken with unalloyed compassion, the second seemed more wooden, as if there was a deeper pain within it. Karen was perceptive enough to grasp this and it led to her snarling.

"You're Death. What the Hell do you know about survival? All you do is kill anything that comes near you."

Death's gaze changed briefly to one of anger and for a moment Karen forgot that she had fourteen inches in height and much more in bulk as Death's presence seemed to fill the room.

_**Far, far more than you think, Kara Zor-L. Far, far more than you think. I know what it is to endure beyond your first universe, to have people who act like your family, even try to be it and to give you what they think you want to see and who know it, up to a point, but can never, ever fill a hole in the heart that stems from.....from other things.** _

Karen froze.

_**As I said, you did nothing wrong. You're here.** _

Karen crossed her arms across her shoulders and floated over to her couch and sat down with a booming sound that seemed to shake the apartment.

"I don't want to be. I miss my family, I shouldn't even exist. There's another Power Girl in this multiverse! She has her fucking Earth and what do I get? More loneliness!"

Death looked at her with a soft stare and a pained expression and then padded over to her, sitting beside her.

_**As I said, I know what it is to endure, to go on and on and on and to not know what it is to do so, to wonder if it is blessing or curse or both.** _

She put her head in her own hands for a moment, staring at the floor. Silence filled the apartment, Karen's anger giving the dark rooms light from the gleaming suns that blazed with a wrath that could easily be unleashed if she willed it. The silence stretched on and the red light faded in turn, as Death finally looked up at her.

_**I can promise you one thing. At the end of this multiverse, like the ones before it, there shall be but two beings. Destiny and Death, and I shall take his book, as I have done before. Our parents the last ones before us, after all our siblings are gone, even the Presence willingly going to that path, before the next creator comes along and seeks to make the next universe. You will not last forever. That is not your burden to bear. For all but one of the Endless, it's not even theirs. You go on now, but your stretch of everything will end, and you will know what it is that you will for yourself.** _

"Is that how it works?"

**_I can only answer questions up to a point. But......as you and people like you would define it, it is. Those who go to the plane of Remiel and Duma go because they see themselves as damned. Those who go to the Silver City go because they see themselves as destined to that plane. Those who go back to the realm of flesh go and are given the breath of life anew. Each path is in the hands of the person who seeks it._ **

"So if I died and I wanted to see my family again...."

_**You could see them again, yes.** _

"How is it fair, to have some live and others die? I had to hold Kal, and watch him die and felt my heart break and all I have left...."

**_If I were to offer to you to call his spirit from the Sunless Lands, to let him speak to you, to let him see you and you him, what would you do?_ **

She froze. "You can do that?"

_**Yes, if I wanted to.** _

"I.......I don't.....I don't know. I don't know what I would do. Part of me says my heart would rejoice but then there's other parts of me that wouldn't. His story ended, and I think he did deserve that."

Death nodded. _**Endings are what give things value.**_

"Then am I worthless?"

Death put her hand on her shoulder, gently. 

_**Far from it. If anything, you offer greater hope than your cousin, or most versions of him. He is the last of a single world, but he came as an infant and was raised by a loving couple and had a set of blessings that are beyond those given to most. You are the last of a multiverse, when you came to your world an older child, and you grew to womanhood amidst wonder and dangers. Then a monster comes and takes it away, and a hero driven mad by grief offers hope and takes that away, too. And yet you're still here. You feel all of this, but if people on your current world need help, do you just let them suffer?** _

Karen stared offended by the very idea. "Absolutely not!"

Death smiled, and the warmth in that smile made Karen feel....strange. Loved, and like she saw someone worthy of love and yet this was no mere someone, this was Death herself and that couldn't.....

"I couldn't let people suffer. No matter what world. They deserve happiness, and a world that can be made better for them."

Death nodded again. **_And this when you have lost everything. You could sink into grief and anger more than you do. Here, you're in an apartment paid for by the Waynes where nobody sheds a tear if Lex Luthor's furniture gets smashed._**

She leaned in to whisper into. her ear, cupping it with her hand in a surprisingly human gesture. **_Even I don't. He tried to bribe and threaten me once, and I responded to that with a joke about a magical singing pony._**

Karen stared. "Wait what?"

Death giggled and nodded. **_Yep. Magical singing pony. His reaction to it was about yours._**

Karen snorted. "I wish I had been there to see that. Lex Luthor sees Death herself and literally gets told something about a magical pony that sings."

Death continued: _**It's not wrong to feel anger, whenever you feel it, or to feel lonely. Or sometimes to just fly to distant places and let grief echo in soundless screams in the void.**_

"You've seen that?"

Death smiled softly. _**I see many things. Grief is never a thing that ends one fine day and it never comes back, it ebbs and it flows, and that's for mortals who've lost less than you have, and you have had less to lose than you do. To endure past an entire phase of everything that is, and to see your family before and to see them so close and yet so far.....**_

Her voice trailed off and there was silence in the darkness of that apartment again as her hand slid away, and went to her lap. Silence stretched on, and it felt comfortable, Karen drying her tears and thinking of the picture, and taking it to look at it. The memory of that day came more strongly to her as she did, hearing Kal's voice, baritone and teasing and remembering Kara's. She was not quite like the Kara Danvers of this world, more aggressive like herself and much less perky. They had been two sides of the same coin and it held true for the Power Girl of this world and the Supergirl, this Power Girl was every bit as dorky as the Kara Danvers of this world, if a bit more prone to the Leeroy Jenkins school of heroism.

The memory and the warmth flooded through her and she cried again, tears that were happier and the memory of Clark and Kara's arms around her giving her warmth. It took her a long time to realize, after that moment faded that there were other tears. She turned to see Death holding herself and crying, murmuring words in a language she did not know, and had no means to fathom. She thought to the words just spoken to her, and she returned the comfort given to her, placing her arm around Death for a moment, as the Endless let herself grieve for the families she had loved and lost and for the weight of infinity upon infinity ending and only one thing enduring through the pages of time. For each iteration of the fates of Despair and Dream and the others hurt as if it was the first time, for she came to love them as if they were her own, and in a sense they were.

Karen didn't know what to say or to do, so she did nothing at all, and moved her hand back to stare at the picture again, a warm smile pervading her.

She was the last of her multiverse and of her family and her people, but they lived on in her.

She said something to that effect and the sobs from her right stopped, for a moment, and there was silence in the darkness again.

 _ **That's true,** _murmured Death. _ **They do. It's easy to forget that when the long sorrows reach out and my sister's mirrors and her hooks take their due. But she too has her purpose, as do we all.**_

"Your sister?"

 _ **Despair,** _Death said quietly. **_She is hope, as I am Life, and it is in her to remember all that has departed. She is not an easy person to be around, even for me._**

Karen nodded, the picture's warmth something that pervaded her in a sense she had forgotten, for a time, in the wake and the fears of Kal's departure, things that intensified more whenever this Kal and this Kara got sick, or hurt. The mortal fear that had struck her when Reign had hurt this Kara was not easily forgotten.

Death mused, quietly. _**It doesn't seem enough, sometimes, does it? To know they endure in you when that endurance itself is an interminable stretching on and on and on and it blurs into things. Crisis after crisis, locking universe after universe only to be drawn back in when the new Presence sets up shop and my brother's book begins with 'In the beginning God began to create the Heavens and the Earth, and the Earth was without form and void.' Loosely, of course, because 'the Earth' is the concept of mortal spheres and of the other pantheons, first and foremost, and when they begin, I return, from parts unknown to these spheres. Beyond the Overvoid, in broader planes where other forces move.**_

Karen looked at her curiously. "Overvoid?"

Death smiled sadly. _**Something that transcends most mortal understanding. The Overvoid links corners of existence, this one in particular linked to a realm much closer where the main heroic figures, for a looser sense of that term, are called the Authority and Mr. Majestic and Planetary, and to another where there are heroes that mirror this one. There, my function has its own being who has that domain and I go there sometimes just to get a break from everything, and to talk to her. She's a bitch but she thinks I'm an insufferably perky Abby Sciuto wannabe (and excuse me, I came first so if anyone's the wannabe of someone it's the other way around) who doesn't do much with my function and is far too passive about resurrections.**_

She shrugged. _**To her, resurrections are anathema and they can make her ill. Oblivion, in that part of everything, is my true counterpart for he shall lock that universe up and then we usually shake hands and wait for the next round. As I said, I know something of these feelings. My brothers and sisters, and sister-brothers, Destiny, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Del, they're not really my brothers and sisters as I know them and as I knew them. They're more....copies, poorly made a bunch of times, and other times so close it makes being around them that much more painful and in those times I am estranged from them as Destruction is from us, and they only see me when I take parts of them to the Sunless Lands, if that much. And I have to smile and love them and I can't not because as I love everyone, I love all my family most of all and I must take them in the end, and endure, and know that I do endure, and that there is nothing else left in the universe until the next creator comes to reshape it in his whim but me.**_

_**So it doesn't matter if Nekron steals some of my energies and uses them to resurrect shells of the dead to stir a virus to infect people. I will take him and the Black Racer and the Angels. I know this. And then I will endure again, in infinite darkness where there is Nothingness so total and empty that I stride out beyond the Overvoid that awaits restoration, and into the deeper corners.** _

She heard the tremors in Death's voice and the shift from a soft monotone to spikes of fear and sorrow, saw Death squeezing her hands together so tightly that they hurt.

She held her hands together, clasping them so firmly together that it hurt.

_**What you know from one multiverse through the next set of shakeups in the cosmic sense, I have known for a far longer span of time. You're not alone, Kara Zor-L of Argo City. i am sorry, for what it's worth, that you do understand this even in part. It's not an understanding I'd wish on anyone.** _

"Is that why I've been through this, to give you someone who gets it, who understands?"

Death shook her head. _**No, that's not why. If it were set up that way then we who are the Endless would be the real monsters, worse than the lords of Apokolips or of New Genesis. In truth I knew of you, and what you've endured, but I didn't want to seek you out. It was my sister-brother who insisted on it. Xie sees my sadness, even when most do not, and wanted me to speak to someone who did get it, without telling me much else. You've made a friend of one of the most dangerous of us, and I have never thought that my sister-brother was capable of such......of what xie is to you**_.

Death looked at the floor. _**You made a friend of xir and have brought something good in xir out, and I was wary of you for that reason, too. Desire's kindnesses toward me have been....unpleasant in the past and that is when Desire does seek good. With Dream Desire wishes to affect him as xie has me, and Dream does not give Desire what xir wants and Desire does not accept no for an answer and so there is great animosity between them. Foolish, petty, petulant, beneath the behavior of beings of our nature and yet all too real. And somehow, that same being whose kindnesses are to be shunned as much as xir animosity sees you and cares for you and is something like a guardian angel to you, though you would be wise to be...wary.**_

_**To Dream and I, anyone Desire looks too kindly on is suspicious by default. But I was wrong, at least about you.** _

Karen flashed a sickly smile.

_**Oh I can't really hate anyone, even when I try. I can't hate Despair, even though the way Despair....changed...hurt me as much as Desire and that was Desire's own doing and I have to look at Despair's face to see a mirror of....things. I can't hate Desire, or those mortals who have done terrible things and glory in them and do them in my name and I am ashamed of that because they do not get me and they never will and they never, ever stop across the long duration. Well....I could hate, if I wished. I can discard my function altogether, too, something none of the rest of us can, though I do not like what I become if I do that. And it is interwoven into the cycle of things that I do so once a multiverse, to underscore a lesson and each time I am locked within it, subject to the rules and the whims that determine the lives of my siblings and I fathom them at that level and become distant after.** _

_**So i didn't hate you. and I wouldn't. But....I saw who was close to you and who was drawn to you, and I have been unwilling to go near you.** _

Death's smile was oddly warm.

_**And now I know one person, in this cycle, who understands what it is to be so alone, who endures wondering if something, this time, can actually do. Can break them or unmake them or grant them a peace they crave until it becomes real at which point well....** _

Karen nodded, conceding the point.

Karen spoke: "It does help, doesn't it?"

Death's smile was warm, and Karen felt herself starting to mirror it. "I don't feel.....it's like the burden's lesser even when it isn't."

_**Because now you're not alone, bearing a weight that feels the more smothering because even those who would try to help cannot, because you would rather not see even the very worst enduring this same fate and this same burden.** _

Karen nodded. "Two-Shadows isn't that bad, Death."

Death snorted. You've only seen xir good side. The memories of being on her knees in her apartment when a plant gripped her and showed her her own first family again, and then visions of other aching wishes in her heart of hearts before it had gone wrong flashed through her. So did the taunting of Desire to Dream on that day in that conclave, and her hissed warning to her brother-sister who had shut up then, quietly and even fearfully.

Karen laughed, softly. "Still that's what I've seen."

She looked at the picture. "I.......I forget, sometimes, that the warmth and the good times don't fade because of the memories of the loss that leaves them in memory alone. I see the loneliness, and see it worse when my counterpart and Kara and Clark remind me of the people I knew. It stings that way, but it does."

Death nodded. **_Yes, it's a paradox that....well....._** she looked at her gloves. _**It hurts because it makes us wish that we could see them again and we can never do that. They deserve to rest in their peace, and we preserve their memories, and their legacies, in our lives. Hopefully in the best ways, though that isn't possible all the time.**_

Karen smiled, a memory crossing her of when she'd made friends with Kara after both had worked against a league of both Lex Luthors against the Supermen of their respective worlds, relying on Luthor's misogyny to do three quarters of the job, which it did. Luthor had learned the hard way and soon after recruited Mercy and her sister from the Banu Mighdall and things had become harder, but that first time was fun, seeing her counterpart and enjoying their similiarities as with their differences. The warmth there and from the pride of their cousins and the establishment of the friendship and cross-worlds ties of Earths-1 and 2 flooded through her and once again the happy tears came, as Death smiled and then stood up.

_**I hope this helped you, it did me.** _

Karen nodded and to Death's surprise pulled her into a hug that left the woman staring at Karen confused and then returning it a second time. She vanished into a ripple of energy like stones skipping over water. Karen sat in the darkness, looking at the picture, and then curled on her couch and sank into a dream of her homeworld, and of the time when she'd last held Clark, and remembered the words he'd whispered in her ear as he faded from existence. _I love you,_ the last words she'd heard from her cousin, and her homeworld. For the first time in the last few years, when she had that dream, she was able to sleep through the night. And unknown to her, after a quiet whisper in the ear of a being clad in white with skin whiter than his clothes and eyes like infinite darkness with wheeling stars within them, her nightmares receded, and her dreams would become kinder and things that she could endure.

\----------

The next day, after a busy day tracking down the Friends of Humanity, refugees from a parallel universe with different superheroes who'd made a brief alliance with a counterpart here in this one. When it had turned out that the Friends of Humanity aspired to eliminate metahumans, or mutants, as they insisted on calling them, it had led to a mutually destructive shootout between them settled by the joint arrival of Karen and Kara, and then from a circular rift that looked like light and smoke interwoven, a group of people who called themselves the Avengers, who took the Friends of Humanity back, Kara looked at Karen when the other woman was smiling and confident, instead of hiding a withdrawn shell of herself beneath an affable mask.

Her jaw genuinely gaped when Karen affectionately chucked her on the chin and told her that she'd be coming over for dinner with her and Alex, if it was all right, and then enthusiastically squeed in a way that led Karen to affectionately roll her eyes.

She smiled. Whatever had happened yesterday, something had healed a hurt in someone who reminded her of what was one of her own greatest fears, from her own Crisis. If she'd lost everything and been all there was of her entire universe, she didn't know how she'd be able to function. Karen struggled, but it seemed that somehow, she'd been able to make peace with everything and in her heart of hearts, Kara Zor-El decided that she would aspire to that same strength, and beyond that, to fight all the harder, so that her world and this one, where Kara Zor-L had made her home, would never go through that same fate.

In a flash she flew into the sky and to the DEO.

After the paperwork, there was the apartment and Alex and Maggie would be waiting. And her new friend, who understood her more than most, and showed her that her family in the end really was hope, in its truest form as a streak of blue and red in the sky, beneath the energies of the golden sun.


End file.
